The Hollywood blockbuster UFO film directed by Steven Spielberg (right), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, premiered in New York City on November 17, 1977. Although Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek (pictured below) had originated the term “close encounters” in his 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, the movie’s use of the phrase allowed it to leap from ufological jargon directly into timeless popular culture. An instant success, Close Encounters also cemented Spielberg’s reputation (close on the dorsal fins of Jaws) as a major director, saved Columbia Pictures from a financial downturn, and put Hynek and the UFO phenomenon in the national spotlight where both gained new credibility amid a wave of public interest that has diminished little over the past 30 years.

In exchange for his use of the famous phrase, Spielberg invited Hynek to serve as a technical consultant for the film. Hynek recalled in a 1985 interview that he only gave advice on such things as the “radio telescope and how a military officer would say things.” Although he sat down with Spielberg and went over the script, only some details got changed. “At that time I was caught up in the glamor of Hollywood myself,” Hynek admitted, “seeing how a picture was made, so I went along with it and I had a lot of fun. But that’s about all.”

Spielberg credited Hynek’s place in the movie as more of an inspirational role model. In a 1997 documentary, he explains that Hynek “found the witness reports very credible and he found so many similarities from so many portions of America as well as throughout the world that he became a convert to the fact that the government was hiding something. . . . So I met with him and I used him and I picked his brain and he consulted with me. He’s even in the movie in a bit of a scene in the third act. I owe a lot to his instilling in me a professional’s point of view on this kind of field reporting, and he helped me make the movie more credible than it would have been without his existence.”

The contact sequence in the movie was filmed, not at Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, where some of the exteriors were shot, but inside a huge aircraft hangar in Mobile, Alabama. According to the Internet Movie Database, “The UFO landing site built for the movie was 27 meters high, 137 meters long, and 76 meters wide, making it the largest indoor film set ever constructed.” The UFO was added in later, of course, so the actors had to gaze up at nothing and pretend to react to a landed mother ship with blinking lights.

Bob Balaban, who played UFO researcher David Laughlin in the film, recalls in Spielberg, Truffaut and Me (Titan Books, 2002), based on his diary at the time, that Hynek arrived on the set in Mobile on July 23, 1976:

“He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and doesn’t look like a scientist except for his neatly cropped Van Dyck beard which makes him look a little like the Wizard of Oz. He thinks the movie will help the UFO cause since Steven has done such thorough research, and based so much of the film on actual events. . . . No photographs can be taken on the set, so Hynek sits quietly in his canvas chair aiming a small tape recorder in the direction of the filming. Since he can’t take pictures, he’s taping the sounds in the hangar to help him remember this day. Later that night, Hynek gives a lecture to us interested UFO-ers. [Richard] Dreyfuss and Melinda [Dillon] are there, along with about forty other people. After a short spiel about subscribing to a UFO newsletter he’s publishing, Hynek dims the lights and shows slides of various UFOs he’s authenticated. He even shows a picture of an umbrella-like object he snapped from an airplane. About a dozen people, including Melinda, raise their hands when Hynek asks if any of us have ever had a close encounter.”

Hynek’s eight-second cameo begins at 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds into the film (the 137-minute “Collector’s Edition” version of 1998), just after the pilot and crew of Flight 19 emerge from the landed UFO. He strolls to the front of the crowd, brushes his goatee, and inserts his pipe into his mouth. The timing is somewhat ironic, since Hynek had objected to Spielberg’s associating UFOs with the missing Navy TBM Avenger bombers in 1945.

The UFO sequence that traumatizes Richard Dreyfuss’s character was based in part on the famous Portage County police chase that took place April 17, 1966, when police cruisers chased a large UFO—which one officer described as looking like an “ice cream cone with a sort of partly melted down top”—for 60 miles from Ohio to Pennsylvania. Hynek had provided a summary of the case on pages 100–107 of The UFO Experience.

Spielberg was also probably influenced by the books of French-American UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, after whom the character of the scientist Claude Lacombe (played by François Truffaut) is modeled, although Spielberg did not meet Vallee until after the film was completed.

For the 30th anniversary of the film this year, Spielberg is issuing Close Encounters once again on November 13, in both DVD and Blu-ray formats. Through a process known as “seamless branching,” the Blu-ray version contains all three versions on a single disc. The process identifies the differences, segments the footage, and then arranges it into three unique playlists so that frames used in all three films are only included on the disc once.

Perhaps Spielberg’s most significant achievement with Close Encounters was to portray aliens as powerful yet benign, a concept at odds with 1950s films and their bug-eyed monsters intent on conquering the planet. As Lester D. Friedman put it in Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2006), “Close Encounters presents a more progressive, tolerant, and even cosmopolitan vision of the universe than the vast majority of the science-fiction films preceding it.”

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[This is an excerpt of an article that appeared in a recent issue of the International UFO Reporter, published by the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) in Chicago.]